Winter of Discontent? How Brands Can Retain Authenticity While Using GenAI
In today's fast-paced digital landscape, brands are constantly seeking innovative ways to engage their audience. Across channels of email marketing, social media and within the marketing funnel, creative content is a key way that brands can build a relationship with their audiences.
This creates a challenge for brands: your social media content needs to renew itself daily, based on the latest memes and trends. Your website blog needs impactful bottom-of-funnel content to remind your customers that your products exist to change their lives. You need unique, powerful imagery to capture your customers’ imaginations. You may even need several iterations of all of this to A/B test!
Generative AI (GenAI) could be the solution, and everyone from ecommerce giants to small businesses is looking to streamline their marketing efforts with this powerful tool. But recent research has revealed a contradiction: 49% of consumers think that GenAI use harms brand authenticity.
As much as customers love engaging content, they also love authenticity. Any brand integrating generative AI in their marketing must be proactive to earn and keep the trust of their audience. Here’s how.
The Importance of Authenticity in Marketing
Consumers have more choice than ever about the brands they choose, meaning brands have to work harder than ever to create a connection with their audience that runs deeper than the price tag. Authenticity is a vital component of engaging your audience, generating trust and creating an emotional connection that integrates your products or services with your customers’ lifestyles.
Strengthening perceptions of authenticity leads to:
- Trust: When consumers believe a brand is genuine, they're more likely to trust and engage with it.
- Loyalty: Authentic brands often enjoy higher customer loyalty, as people prefer to support businesses they perceive as honest and transparent.
- Engagement: Authentic content resonates more deeply with audiences, leading to higher engagement rates.
90% of millennials say authenticity is key when choosing a brand and authenticity is so important for brands that it’s become a topic of academic discussion. Authenticity should be at the heart of any brand strategy, and particularly when integrating AI into your marketing efforts.
The Power of Generative AI in Marketing
Generative AI allows brands to create high-quality content quickly and in a scaleable way. Producing creative content is hard — with generative AI, there’s no such thing as a blank page. First drafts are ready-made, allowing you to get the ball rolling before adding a human touch. Here’s how brands are integrating GenAI into their marketing efforts:
Naming and Brand Strategy: AI can generate catchy brand names and build a coherent brand strategy in seconds, eliminating the painstaking initial brainstorming stages in brand building.
Creative Ad Copy: Writing persuasive ad copy that resonates with diverse audiences can be time-consuming, particularly when we’re A/B testing copy to hone in on the best results. GenAI can generate multiple variations of compelling copy, allowing marketers to test and optimize their campaigns efficiently.
Captivating Image Production: GenAI tools can edit and enhance images, helping brands maintain high visual standards without the constant need for professional designers. This can streamline your campaigns, allowing you to react to news, current affairs and trending memes with highly engaging, speedily produced visual content.
Engaging Social Media Content: A consistent stream of engaging content is essential in an algorithm-powered era. From generating witty tweets to creating engaging Instagram posts, GenAI can assist in maintaining a consistent and captivating social media presence.
GenAI is a powerful tool for brands looking to stay current and stand out. But according to our survey, nearly half of the respondents feel that generative AI harms perceptions of brand authenticity. This statistic highlights a significant challenge for marketers: How can brands leverage GenAI's efficiencies without compromising the authentic connection with their audience?
Maintaining Authenticity While Using GenAI
Transparency is Key
Just one-third of consumers are confident they can spot GenAI content, creating an atmosphere of suspicion online. From political deep fakes to airbrushed ads, consumers might not always spot AI-generated content, but they will be questioning whether it’s there.
In this climate, one of the most effective ways to maintain authenticity when using GenAI is to be transparent about its use. 77% of consumers expect brands to be transparent about AI usage, and brands that openly disclose their use of AI are more likely to maintain trust.
Add the Human Touch
While GenAI can generate content, adding a human touch is crucial to ensure it resonates authentically with the audience. Personalize your content by tailoring AI-generated content to reflect the brand's unique voice, and targeting your customers’ specific needs.
Coca-Cola is one brand going all-in on the power of AI, but not forgetting that all-important human touch. “It’s all about AI and HI, artificial intelligence and human ingenuity”, said Europe CMO Javier Meza.
Engage with Your Audience
Using GenAI doesn't mean brands should distance themselves from their audience — in fact, using AI to generate content can create another opportunity to ask your customer’s opinions. By encouraging discussions about AI and its role in content creation, and by staying open to feedback, you can strengthen perceptions of authenticity and reinforce trust.
Regularly ask your audience about their perceptions and comfort levels with AI-generated content, through polls and questioning social media posts. You can foster community discussions around the use of GenAI, and meaningfully address any concerns.
Always Stay True to Brand Values
Brands should ensure that their use of GenAI aligns with their core values. Misalignment can lead to a perception of inauthenticity, so ensure you have a brand style guide in place that outlines your brand tone, and use it when creating prompts for GenAI content.
You might even reject generative AI altogether to emphasize your values, like Dove — a brand known for its commitment to natural beauty. Dove has publicly stated that they will never use AI-generated models in their advertising, and this stance reinforces their brand values and strengthens their authenticity in the eyes of their consumers.
Wrapping Up
Generative AI offers huge potential for brands to streamline content creation and enhance their marketing efforts, but it can’t come at the cost of authenticity. Through transparency and an alignment with brand values, brands can leverage GenAI whilst maintaining, or even strengthening, perceptions of authenticity.
Brand-building is a two-way street, a call-and-response act with your customers. When you’re integrating AI into your marketing efforts, be ready to listen to what they have to say.